Talk:License

I feel pretty unhappy that this Wiki appears not have a licence, despite a claim to the contrary that brought me to this page. What's wrong with the standard licence?

Roger Williams

Yes, the confusion should be cleared up. The note at the bottom of this editing page says that the GNU Free Documentation License is used, altho elsewhere in this wiki it suggests it is not decided. Clarity is needed.

Fred Swartz

Bruno,

Can you nail down this license issue with the wiki. I want to make sure everyone feels comfortable with adding content to the wiki and knowing their work won't be exploited.

Thanks !

John

I hadn't noticed that there was a GFDL license statement at the bottom whenever a page is edited. This means that all the existing content is already under the GFDL and that adding or changing licenses at this stage is probably impractical.

This is fine, the GFDL license is good enough. I've modified the text in License and PanoTools:Copyrights to point this out explicitly. If you find time it would be useful to put a statement in the footer of each page.

By the way, the one thing that is common with all these 'Open Source' licenses is that exploiting the work is encouraged. There is nothing to stop somebody taking the whole thing and repackaging it as a book for sale.

Bruno.

How about adding it to the "Disclaimers" page? This shows up at the bottom of each page.

John

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I'd like to change

"All content added to this site so far is licensed under the GFDL with no "Invariant sections" or "Cover Texts"."

to:

"All content added to this site is copyrighted by its respective editors and licensed under the GFDL with no "Invariant sections" or "Cover Texts"."

This clarifies that content is still copyrighted by its creators, and licensed under GFDL - GFDL doesn't override copyright.

The other option (which may require a lot more discussion) would be to require all content copyright to be transferred to the PanoTools wiki owner. The major distinction here is that if copyright is maintained by individual creators then you need their consent (in each case) for license changes. if the wiki owner maintains copyright then he may re-license the Wiki content as he desires.

-Roger

Yes change the text

It should be clarified that contributions are copyright by the individual authors.

Might as well remove the stuff about possible future GPL or Creative Commons licenses, as it isn't possible
to relicense the existing content without everyone agreeing.

-Bruno

Major revisions made

I made two major revisions as described in the Summarys:

- Clarified that content remains copyrighted to the respective editors; the GFDL is merely a license under which copyrighted material is distributed - it does not preclude the copyrights inherent to content creators
- Removed language about possible future licenses. That text is preserved below for further discussion. It should be noted here that license changes cannot be made without consent of the copyright holders (the editors). This should not preclude use of the content in other GFDL-compatible instances, but does preclude spinning content off into non-GFDL-compatible projects without further consent.